Ka-yoot!

The only thing cuter than a baby's hat is a hat for a low-birthweight baby. This hat is going to Caps to the Capital in the name of my friend Helen Brenna. I made Helen a pair of Pomatomus socks last year and this year I'm asking recipients of my handiwork to pick a charity item for me to knit in their name.

Yarn: Leftover Cascade 220 Quatro; less than an ounce
Needles: Knit Picks Options, US 8/5.0 mm and US 10/6.0mm using Magic Loop technique
Pattern: Save the Children's free pattern from their Caps to the Capital Action Kit. I knit this one in the round instead of flat, because I don't see the point of knitting a hat flat. Plus, for some reason, I have no 6.0mm straight needles.

In sock knitting news, I started the toe decreases on the second Monkey sock last night, but my eyes were rolling up in my head so I put them aside. I'll finish those this afternoon.

Master Knitting: Still working on the cable swatches, but they're getting better. I think what happened was that after I finally perfected my flat knitting tension last summer, I knit almost exclusively in the round, and my body forgot what it had learned.

I have a checklist for what is left to be done for the question/answers and I'm plowing through that list. Most of what I have to do is find references to back up my answers. There are a few questions where I actually had to look things up to answer them properly, but mostly my problem is finding references for some of the answers. For example, I have a very easy, straight-forward method for calculating multiple increases across a single row. Most of the time I can do it in my head. I had never looked up how to do this (never even occured to me), because it's basic arithmetic. I could find only one book that used my method, and that was Montse Stanley's Knitter's Handbook. Montse Stanley was a very sensible woman. The rest of the books have worksheets and multi-step calculations that give the same result, but are so complicated it's a miracle anyone can follow them. I certainly can't.